What your children should know before first grade. Thoughts on educating the brightest.

View 807 Tuesday, January 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

 

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

 

Another day of recuperation. I’m almost back, healthwise, although my energy levels are still low, and it takes about as much energy to do routine housekeeping as it does to write an essay. Worse, the most serious sign of aging for me is the time it takes to focus in on a new subject, and how easily it is to be interrupted – after which it takes almost as long to get back to work as it did the first time, but it also takes a while just to get focused on the routine task that has to be done now before I can even think about returning to work. But over time all this is abating.

Roberta is about a week behind me in recovery.

Educating the Brightest

"It says little we haven’t been saying here for years, but the long term effect of ignoring the brightest 10% so that you can devote a larger portion of education to bringing up those just below normal up to normal is disastrous."

I recall a lesson from a high school economics class… Two people shoveling, one who is 10% faster than the other. Two shovels are available, one that can shovel lift 10% more material than the other. Which of the two people should get the better shovel? If the goal is to increase the overall production, then the better shoveler should get the better shovel If the goal is to try to equalize the output between the two, then give the better shovel to the less capable person.

Obviously, this is a very simplistic demonstration of how to allocate resources. But the concept can be applied to education. Of course… the first thing that needs to be done is to decide: What is the goal?

Karl

But whatever the goal, you must have enough resources to get the job done. If there are only two holes and they’ll be dug in a day no matter what method you use that’s one thing; but if resources are scarce, the thoughts of fairness and generosity have to go be the wayside. The early colonists learned this: if we all starve, there is nothing to give to the poor. Wealthy societies can bash down the curbs to provide ramps for the disabled; but as the wealth vanishes, this is one activity that goes to the bottom of the city worker list. We have that in Los Angeles. In a great year for tax collectors they dutifully go out and bash another curb or two, but in the past few years that no longer happens. One corner near us has three bashed curbs with ramps, and a couple of years ago two of them got yellow bumpy ramp things inserted, but there has never been enough money to bash the fourth curb, and there seems not enough even to put the yellow thing in at the third. Meanwhile every street has its potholes.

Without proper education of the brightest our productivity falls and falls.

There is a lot of capital out there. That’s what big income discrepancies are: accumulations of capital. But if there are not educated workers to hire, expanding business looks overseas for places to invest. For good or ill, the industrial revolution demands the best efforts of the brightest. If instead the goal of the schools is the welfare of the school employees including teachers, and the second goal is to appear to be fair, the results will be horrid for the Republic.

One thing income discrepancy does is make it simple enough for the wealthy to pass not merely wealth, but education to its next generation. Whatever the three children of Bill and Melinda Gates inherit, it will not be $70,000 in school debts.

You ask the right question: what is the goal. It used to be that the goal was liberty. That had the great merit of being one of the better ways to increase productivity. And one goal used to be to educate each child to yeye’s highest potential. This is no problem if you have enough resources: but if it takes as much effort to raise a dull normal child to the productivity of a normal as it does to raise the productivity of a bright normal to a new level, if you have limited resources it’s obvious what you must do if you are to be sustaining.

We see recently the argument that IQ can be raised, and that 10,000 hours of practice will allow one to master almost any subject. This is asserted by people who have some reason to think it, but there is this obvious fact: if you aren’t learning much you won’t devote 10,000 hours to any given subject, so it’s arguable that only those with a natural talent will stay with it: so have you raised IQ or managed to overcome nature with proper nurture, or…

But it seems obvious to me.

 

For those with children to educate it is important that you do not trust the schools for certain elementary but important things. One is to teach them to read. By read I mean that before they leave first grade they can read any normal English word they encounter, even if it takes a bit of effort for something like polychromatic or deamimatosis, and yes I made that last one up, but if you can read you read that one.

The other thing children should learn before the end of first grade is the addition tables up to 20 plus 20. By end of second grade (and many can learn this by end of first) they should know the multiplication tables up to 20 x 20, and I’d recommend giving them a bonus incentive to learn to 25 x 25. It’s rote learning, much like giving a computer a lookup table, and it’s worth it because it makes arithmetical calculations a lot easier and simpler. While it is possible to know algebra and calculus without being very good with arithmetic, it is much harder because you can’t know if you missed the answer by misunderstanding or just by bad arithmetic. Knowing the plus and times tables, and I mean really knowing them, also gives you some insights into the way numbers work. Clearly you learn that 9 times 11 is the same as 11 times 9 (and you should have memorized both) but you will also cotton on to some obvious principles.

As to how to make young children learn stuff like plus and times tables, I suggest bribes. Money works. It’s cheap at the price, because the alternative will be waste of tuition money paid to expensive schools, and increased student tuition debt. Trust me on this. A few bucks spent on the times tables will generate a very high payoff in later years…

Common Core = Cargo Cult

http://minx.cc/?post=346625

"Professional Highly-Educated Education Researchers noted that high-level early readers were usually just identifying words at a glance — reading in a "whole word" way. While kids using Phonics read more slowly. Phonics kids were slower readers and struggled with it more.

So hey — let’s stop teaching kids this slow method of reading called Phonics and just teach them "Whole Word" reading!!! Win, win, win!!! It’s easier for the students, and even easier for the teachers, as they don’t have to teach the step-by-step Phonics method of reading. They can just say the word "horse" is horse and keep saying it until these stupid kids start learning that "horse" means horse.

Here’s the problem: This is Cargo Cult mentality. Yes, the high-lanrneig, early-raednig kids are in fact using the Wlohe Wrod raenidg mhoted, just as you, reading that gibberish I just wrote, employed Whole Word reading — looking at the first and last letters of the word and using context and years and years of experience in how the written language works, and what words are expected to come in which place in a sentence to read, fairly easily, a bunch of misspelled words as the words I intended."

—

Jason Merrell

We waste a great deal of our educational resources to begin with. This is an interesting essay, most of which I might have written myself: http://minx.cc/?post=346625 I recommend it. Good demonstration. Cargo Cult is a good label for the concept, and the entire essay is worth while.

 

Dr. Pournelle:

I don’t know if you’ve read Conquest’s "Harvest of Sorrow", but the more time that goes by, the more Obamacare comes to resemble the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. They share the common threads of:

* megalomaniacal central planning fantasies.

* wildly incompetent planning.

* even more wildly incompetent execution.

* an utterly delusional assessment mechanism.

* a total willingness to tell literally any lie in support of it.

* a complicit Western press eager to believe the lies.

* a total disregard for the negative results.

* an almost childlike glee in the harm being done.

When the whole thing does come crashing in on itself, I expect that Obama will declare the system, "dizzy with success"…

I have corresponded with Robert Conquest for many years, and we met at a couple of conferences, including one in Moscow just as the USSR was crashing. I do not know what he would think of this observation, but it is interesting to me. Thank you.

 

Yup.

http://www.havenews.com/news/commentary/an-example-of-why-the-marine-corps-works-1.259735?page=0

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Codevilla: ‘The bureaucrats’ personal interests come first. The welfare and reputation of the agency come second. Everything else is incidental.’

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/20/a-self-licking-ice-cream-cone/>

—–

Roland Dobbins

The Iron Law applies to the Company and indeed the entire Intelligence Establishment.

 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.